


Personal Ghosts

by dreamofroses



Category: French Revolution RPF
Genre: Brothers, Gen, Guillotine, Guilt, Historical Inaccuracy - Mild, Regret, Thermidor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 16:57:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15465945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamofroses/pseuds/dreamofroses
Summary: Is it too late to be haunted by the people you sent to the guillotine when you are waiting at the foot of it for your own death?





	Personal Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for a college class my senior year. I liked it fairly well but I hadn't done the research that I have done today and I didn't have the same eye for detail when I was fighting my overbearing professor for my creative autonomy. I blame every fault on her--not really. But, imperfect as it is, I still like it well enough and thought today would be a good day to post it.

The sun rests upon the rooftops of Paris, casting the sky in pale orange and blue. The buildings are a jagged smear of charcoal against it, their various chimneys like blades pointed at Heaven. We sit in rough, wooden tumbrils, surrounded by gardens, palaces, and the river, which runs languidly through the heart of the city. Gendarmes stand guard all about, prepared to stop an escape which we, in our battered states, are not prepared to make. The grim frame of the guillotine rises beside us. It drips with the blood of those who have gone before. The air might be thick with the scent of death and the sweat of a summer day except for the breeze that wafts up from the river.

The crowd that has come to partake in the festivities that always accompany an execution, a mix of neatly dressed bourgeois and filthy sans-culottes, seems to fidget as a single entity in the lull that comes between executions as the machine is reset for the next death. What makes them so eager to witness our deaths? We were their most ardent supporters and they ours. I cannot believe that simple bloodlust motivates this betrayal. Are they so duped by the official reports issued from the treacherous journals aligned with the upstarts?

I see no faces that I recognize among the assembled. The traitors in the Convention have gone home to a light supper. They will not watch their work come to fruition. They would choke on their guilt. They are as deserving of this fate as my companions and I. No, more so for they have acted in bad faith. I may have been complicit in sending men to this very place but it was unquestionably for the good of the Republic and I have died a thousand times for having done so.

Marat sits across the table from me in my stuffy, little, book-lined room on the Rue Saint-Honoré, his dark and crooked face pinched as he fights for words and a decorum that does not come naturally to him. This is my home and he must treat it with the consideration due our mutual respect, even if we do not have a mutual understanding. He raises a hand to his face and then forms a white-knuckled fist as he resists touching the blistered rash that covers all his visible skin.

“The tyrant must die,” he tells me, his voice strained.

“No,” I disagree. “Remove him from power. Send him away. Use whatever means you will, but we cannot kill him. To take a man’s life—” I shake my head. “We must find another way.”

Marat slams his fist down on the table and we sit in shattered silence. His eyes, heavy-browed and bright with the fervent passion of his soul, are fixed on my face. I nearly tremble under their intensity but I will not to let it show.

"Louis Capet must die,” he repeats. “There is no other way.”

I expressed that sentiment later before the Convention. I do not know how many sleepless nights I passed in consideration of that question but I had let myself be convinced. The king must die so that the nation may live. And so he did. And so followed many others. And France has survived. And France has succeeded against her enemies. The people are fed. The war is all but over.

They blame me for the deaths—which they supported, they voted for—but forget that success has always a price. If coming into freedom were so painless, so happy a thing, then we would not have waited until our suffering was such that we could endure no longer. As Marat said to me, as I have said to others, “There is no other way.”

Sanson has fixed the blade of the guillotine once more at the top of the frame and the people let out a cheer for their pet executioner. He gives them a gift of showmanship in a little flourish of a bow and then he addresses himself to the gendarmes who stand along the tumbrils as well as to the crowd.

The gendarmes climb into the tumbril for the next victim of this betrayal, jostling me, sending pain through my shattered jaw. I lean against the side of the cart, away from them, but keep my gaze turned in their direction to brace for the next movement. They struggle to lift my brother between them. He is a big man and unwieldy when completely limp. His head rolls from side to side as they shift him. Blood stains his lips.

He is a representative of the people in the great National Convention, the envoy of the Committee, the friend of France’s most promising General Bonaparte, and, in my memory, a little boy five years my junior, not yet breeched, running after his old brother through the crowded streets of Arras, warbling some approximation of my name. I glance over my shoulder to be certain that I have not lost him but I do not slow enough to allow him to meet me.

“Maxime!” I am content to hear his voice above the Arrageois crowd.

As the gendarmes carry him past me, Augustin exhales. The breath is so deep, so rattling—half-choking—and so long in fading that the gendarmes pause, waiting for a next breath that may never come. His face is livid, appearing even more blanched against his black curls which stick in the blood and sweat on his skin, plastered against his forehead.

He is soaked through with an early autumn rain, standing at the coach depot in town. His coat is open and his hands are in his pockets. He is sixteen and reckless. He must have read a disapproving look on my face because he looks down at his sodden shoes and then back up at me.

“I was to see Henriette,” he says. He means our sister’s grave but the wound is too fresh for the word, especially since I have not been in town since before she died. “I remembered that you would be here this afternoon and I thought—Charlotte is in bed with a headache.”

I can think of nothing intelligent to say. “Where is your hat?”

Augustin runs his hand over his dripping hair. “I must have lost it.”

I could chide him about irresponsibility, about the waste of money we do not have for a new hat, but I know full well that he left it at home because he did not think it would rain, because he did not care how it looked to run through the streets bare-headed. Regardless, he is my responsibility. I remove my own hat and set it on his head. “You’ll catch your death of cold.” The words are heavy in Henriette’s absence and Augustin will not meet my eye.

Softly, shallowly, he inhales. The gendarmes are attentive. They hear him, feel the slight rise in his chest. They adjust him in their arms and continue to the scaffold. His head lolls against the chest of the gendarme holding his shoulders.

He straightens his shoulders, standing before the Convention. I can see the fear in the tautness of his features, the shifting of his eyes. He turns his gaze about the room, meeting the eyes of the traitors and opportunists. “I am as guilty as my brother,” he says. “I share his virtues; I want to share his lot. I ask for an order of prosecution against me also.”

It is foolish loyalty. This scene has played before the Convention more than once—the Girondins, the Hébertists, the Indulgents. The fate of those accused is not unknown. The Indulgents survived but six days after their arrest. I cannot imagine that we will survive as long. Augustin knows this just as well. He remembers my scrambled attempts, my failure, to save my dear friend, Camille, accused with the Indulgents. He critiqued my efforts even as he comforted me that I could not have done more without joining them. The letter is still in my office.

The gendarmes climb the stairs to the platform slowly. They pause on each step to readjust their grip on my brother. To drop him now would be to ruin the pageantry. How could they face the crowd if they could not manage to bring one man up to the device of death? It would be a greater embarrassment to them than to the man so unceremoniously dropped.

Perhaps I should have endeavored to buy my brother a commission in the army. He has always been big and strong and he has a sense of bravado that would have served him well in the business of glory—more than as a lawyer, certainly. He was quite at home socializing with General Bonaparte and he has such a mind that he might have challenged his friend in terms of military genius. What is most important, whatever the dangers of military service might be, he would not be on his way to a dishonorable death at the guillotine as an outlaw.

Augustin claps me on my arm, seeking my attention, but I cannot take my eyes off the ruined suicide’s corpse beside me. The blood is everywhere—on the wall, on my face, on the paper I was signing. Oh, yes, I was signing. I lean forward. Augustin rips the pen from my hand and slams it on the table. He presses a pistol in its place. The National Guard is at the door.

“We must go, Maxime,” he says. “Now.” He pulls me up out of my seat but my knees are weak and I begin to sink back down. Augustin grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me. “We have to leave here.”

I understand his words but my body feels leagues away. I cannot run. I stumble after him. He leads me to a window and tries to make me go through. I see the target, an open sewer with enough water to break my fall. I balk at the drop. I back away, fighting my brother’s urging. One of our companions loses patience and jumps out ahead of me. There is a loud crash as the door is broken down. I turn to look—the blue-coated Guardsmen rush in, muskets ready. I glance over at Augustin, but he is gone.

The gendarmes have reached the top of the stairs. They shift Augustin in their arms once more and then they bring him to the board where they lay him face down. Sanson attends to his placement on the board, adjusting and readjusting him before beginning to fasten the belts. There is no request for last words. What purpose would there be in asking an unconscious man?

The anticipation of the waiting crowd is growing palpably. They sway and chatter at each other as Sanson finishes with the belts. He straightens and the crowd falls breathlessly silent.  

I sit in a sunlit parlor far from here, in summertime Arras where my family is whole again. Henriette is seated across from me, still eighteen, smiling into her coffee at some joke I have just made. Her raven’s wing curls escape the pins and ribbons that hold them mostly back from her face and her eyelashes are strikingly black against her pale cheek—too pale I only knew later. Charlotte is scolding Augustin in an adjacent room because he is not growing into the man she dreamed he would be. Her voice rises and falls in the harsh tones of our northern accent, the one they mock me for in Paris, and I wish to invite Henriette to play something on the piano, anything will do, to drown her out, but I instead make a shallow remark on the weather. Soon, Augustin will end Charlotte’s tirade with a reminder that she is his sister and not his mother. He does not know how it wounds her because he does not remember our mother. Henriette will leave me to comfort Charlotte and we shall not have peace again until evening when Augustin mumbles his apology over supper. But for now, we rest on a moment frozen in memory. It cannot end. It cannot end for, if it does, Henriette will be consumed by illness while I am far away, my only notice a tearstained letter from Charlotte, and Augustin will lose his head, his only guilt having been to share my name.

For a moment, I stand before a grave that does not yet exist for a man who is not yet dead. Augustin Robespierre: the man who died because his brother was too willing to accept the suffering of man as necessary.

If any among us is at fault, it is I. I allowed this. I argued it was necessary. There is no other way? I did not look for another way. How many have died? How many have been sacrificed at the altar of our revolution? How many were like Augustin? How many were young brothers guilty only in name?

I stand on trembling legs, dizzy, suffocated in bandages. I stand but all eyes are on my brother and his executioner. I am invisible.

I slam my own fists on the desk and meet Marat’s enflamed gaze with an audacity that I was never able to muster in reality.

“There was always another way,” I insist. “But you convinced me otherwise and I, I let you. Murderer. Assassin. We both deserve our deaths.”

Sanson’s hand is on the lever which will release the guillotine’s blade.

Please. I confess. I admit to everything. Take me. Torture me. Kill me. I deserve everything. I deserve more. I cannot restore to life those I allowed to die. I cannot rescue those who slipped through my fingers. So, take from me what you will. But let my brother go. He is an innocent. He was loyal to me, nothing more. The blame is mine, not his. Release him. Take me. I will not fight. I will not argue. I voted for this. This was my decision. This was my fault.

The blade falls.

I kneel in the rain that soaks the Arras churchyard. Augustin’s grave lies before me. Henriette is to his left, Charlotte is to his right. Beyond them, stones spread out into infinity. They cannot be counted but I feel each of them carved into my skin. Their names run through my blood, unknown and unforgettable. These are the victims of my revolution, my personal ghosts. Beneath my brother’s name the epitaph is carved so deeply that time will never wear it away—The man that Maximilien Robespierre killed.

 


End file.
